The present invention relates to devices used in endoscopic surgery and, more particularly, to endoscopic devices with field stop encoding allowing automatic identification of an endoscope that is coupled to an endoscopic video camera.
Endoscopic camera systems provide a surgeon with a view of an area of the body being worked on without the necessity of fully opening up the area, thereby allowing for less invasive surgical procedures. Generally, these devices consist of a camera head coupled to an endoscope and a camera control unit. Different endoscopes are used depending on the area of the body being worked on and the procedures being performed. Likewise, optimal camera settings are different depending on the endoscope being used, the area of the body being worked on and the procedures being performed. It would be desirable to have a system for automatically determining the endoscope being used for optimizing one or more settings for the display or processing of images that improves upon the prior art.